F2F: Feast or Famine

The 2010-2011 Feet to the Fire program was dedicated to the issues of food and hunger. This topic intersected with courses taught in many academic departments, lecture series and artist works. It was also the theme of the First Year Matters program, which included readings, faculty presentations and the Common Moment for incoming freshman.

Cassie Meador performed her newest work, Drift, in October at Wesleyan with the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. The performance is a comic, provocative and wistful piece
that asks us to think about where our food comes from as farmlands are
converted to strip malls and California peaches end up in Georgia. Meador also taught ENVS 346/DANC 346 The Ecology of Eating
in the Fall Semester. Meador is a choreographer/dancer/educator with the acclaimed Liz Lerman
Dance Exchange based in Washington, D.C.

This exhibition
of more than 40 prints and photographs from the Davison Art Center collection
explored the depiction of food and drink across five centuries. Works included Pieter Bruegel
the Elder designed the engravings Fat Kitchen and Thin Kitchen, 1563, as comic
allegories of feast and famine. Käthe Kollwitz protested starvation among the
working classes in Germany. Pop artist Claes Oldenburg monumentalized modern
fast food with Flying Pizza, 1964, and Dieter Roth used cheese as a printing
material in his Small Landscape, 1969.

Food for Thought

September 8 - December 10, 2010

Olin Library

This exhibition highlighted Special Collections and Archives resources
related to food as a social, political and historical phenomenon. On
display were agricultural manuals, early cookbooks and the archives of
Wesleyan’s 19th-century Physiological Society and “father of nutrition
science” Wilbur Olin Atwater, as well as recent artists’ books that
explore climate change and the commodification of food.